The advantage for the PC is that they can come in at a much lower price point for people who don't need ultra high-quality components.

True.

The funny thing is that HP, Gateway, and Acer after years of poopooing the iMac have created their own iMac clones for $100.00 less.

For some people it's nice not to have to deal with a computer box and lots of mysterious cords.

And what are "airport", a "movie atom", and "bonjour"?

AirPort is a good name for a port that connects through the air.

Movie atom??? Where have you seen that?

"Bonjour" means "g'day" in French (and it can be found in English dictionaries too), not a bad name for an open source protocol for announcing and discovering services and devices on a network. Supports Windows too.

Some (not very well explained) information on the difference between WLED backlights and RGBLED backlights can be found here at Wikipedia.

Mark

I don't know, saw it in a post somewhere, hahaha, hey Course I have to salute your good humor, it's refreshing.

Having a computer that is robust AND simple I guess is the holy grail. Hopefully Mac and Windows will merge into something like that.

The best thing about Vegas is that it IS both simple yet complicated without pretense, which is what we all really want, not name brands or lifestyles.


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Movie atom??? Where have you seen that?

bonjour is the most annoying, insidious piece of, well, almost malware on the pc, around.

it might well 'find' things such as devices and printers on the mac, but on three of my pc's running various os - xp pro, win7 32 / 64bit, (installed with ps cs3), it simply caused endless networking problems on boot up (such as limited connection, no connection, etc.,)

i removed it (lots of articles on the net), and have been happy ever since....

I'm not using it either, and I certainly make sure to disable Microsoft's equivalent, "Universal Plug & Play," on every machine I set up.

Lots of trouble there too.

All great in theory, not so hot in practice.

To answer the original post ...

At the MacPro level, I agree. The OEM hardware from Apple is a darn good workstation. Any additional options or additions get a bit pricey compared to the same additions on a PC, but the tend to be solid. The MacPro hardware tends to be solid. FCP and I crash too much, but that is not what you asked.

In my arena and price point, PC's have the advantage. Two similar installations, 15 iMacs and the other is 15 high end (non workstation) PC's. The PC's had more memory and dual hard drives. They were still less expensive without software. Over five years, the PC's have had two machines need service. One hard drive and one graphics card. The iMacs have been in a constant rotation for repair and service. Two or more out of service at any one time. I fixed the PC's in a couple of hours with parts from the local store or from other machines on the campus. The iMacs have to have a specialized tech come to remove the screen front and dig into service.

New machines haven't been fairing any better. Unless I were in the workstation class and budget, my experience for durability says PC. A nearby station with a stable of macs because they like FCP and the Apple media server, have an on-site same day repair contract that they pay through the nose for and use constantly.

iMacs are really more like laptops in how they are built internally.

This means they are not service friendly at all, and the school might have been better off with Mac Minis, which would also have cost about half of the iMacs. They used to be gutless performance-wise, but the recent versions have good oomph comparable to a midrange laptop.

Are you saying that the "stable of macs" were Mac Pros? Can't imagine those getting a lot of repair calls, in the last stats I checked they were very high for reliability.

Apple overall has the highest customer satisfaction and customer service ratings of all major computer manufacturers.

Sure, they have had some real dogs (many older iMacs come to mind especially, and some laptop models), but overall significantly better than Dell, HP, Gateway and the rest.

From a practical standpoint, I would always check the service history for any computer (or car!) I would buy (that also means never buying when it first comes out).

All manufacturers, even the best ones, have models to avoid.

The stable was mostly iMacs. MacPros tend to be pretty durable. I will look at the mini's can they handle FCP full out?

I am being forced from Vegas to an all iMac package. Unfortunately, it will be iMovie or maybe FCP Express to replace my Vegas Pro packages. Same money; not comparable packages. I wouldn't be thinking of leaving if the new package was MacPro's with FC Studio and an Apple Media Server. Unfortunately they feel that Apple is the only way to go with media, so they insist on Apple, even if it means using the consumer packages. Arrrggg.

KK

>>>A handful of notebooks such as the new 17” MacBook Pro and Dell XPS Studio 16 use RGB LED displays<<<

Absolutely not true. I'm not going to do your research for you but the info is available. Apple DOES NOT use RGB Led screens in mac book pros. Tom's hardware is full of it.

You can be sure Apple would use RGB LED words in huge flashing letters on their site if it actually were using those, they are not exactly a company that would pass up hyping anything. Info is there, you just have to know where to look. Mac book pro does not use RGB Led screen. They do not mention it, I have seen it, and other have compared it and not just pulled text out of their ass like Tom's hardware has been doing since the late 90s when Tom sold his business to the highest bidder and lost all respect of anybody who cared about the truth in their reviews..

iMovie '09 is an amazing product that lets you do a lot of bread-and-butter editing with only minutes of training.

The tricky part is that you can't pass off a project to an FCP user. I got one of those from an enthusiastic user to spiff up for a non-profit benefit, and it took me quite a bit of work to make it a normal FCP project.

Final Cut Express OTOH is often described as "too good for the price, why didn't Apple cripple it more?"

It has the same FxPlug plugin architecture as FCP (comes with 200+ filters/transitions/effects), full AVCHD support, full LiveType which allows you to do very nice-looking titles (that you see on TV nearly every day) in minutes vs. many hours in other tools, and it imports iMovie projects if needed.

So you don't get Motion, SoundTrack Pro and the full DVDSP, but you get full compositing capabilities, useable audio handling, and if you want a stunning 3D app for video work that is VERY easy to learn, get Kinemac.

Not too shabby for minutes of work:




And stuff like this is not hard either:



And quite a few people run Final Cut Studio on Mac Mini, and say it actually runs well on recent generations. Just max the RAM.

Per iTunes: "All that software and I STILL can't just drag and drop my music."

I suppose you need to download from iTunes to get the music into your Touch. But for me, using music in various video projects, I switched to using Amazon. Unlike iTunes, all the files drag-n-drop right into Vegas.

[b]And why does iTunes need gigabytes of software updates? And there's no noticeable improvements and the interface is 1987 still, with tabbed dialogs.

I have to suffer with iTunes because I liked the iPod Touch, but I had to stop taking downloads. I never heard of an mp3 player that needs so many updates and separate applications.

All that software and I STILL can't just drag and drop my music. [b]

I own multiple mp3 players .. but have *never* owned any flavor of iPod. I refuse to install iTunes and I only tolerate Quicktime because I need it.

There's a brilliant plug-in called Loader that does drag-and-drop from iTunes into FCP projects, with file conversion and sample rate conversion if necessary (which it usually is when dragging 44.1k CD clips into 48k pro video).

Someone should do the same thing for Vegas...

I don't know where you've seen gigabytes of iTunes updates, I've seen them maybe once a year, if that.
And where are the separate apps?

Can FCP do something like this, though? Completely custom?

Yes it can.

Coursedesign,

Vegas does do that already. During playback and during rendering. No need to SRC source material. (i.e. This is in reference to drag and drop sample rate conversion. I just noticed that there were many other postings during the time I was away from my system.) Per the warranty discussing, no statistics, just personal experience as a business customer. Apple underwhelmed, Dell overwhelmed in support of workstations.

Joe

Joe

Of course, I was just thinking of someone's request for drag-and-drop from iTunes to Vegas, which isn't currently possible.

I'm still looking for the perfect media manager, and I wouldn't suggest that to be iTunes at all...

What about something like this:



For the full HD experience:



There's a lot of stuff downtown!

Why are you posting these lame clips?

And what's so exciting about a 40 second pan down a single image?

I was wondering, do a lot of people build custom Mac machines like PC people do?

And is there a big overclocking and tweaking culture in the Mac community?

Just a PC guy wondering.

I'm peppering this thread with my latest art to give it some panache, and that composite photo is my original photography.

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Why are you posting these lame clips?

And what's so exciting about a 40 second pan down a single image?